Omelets with Eggshells: On the Failure of the Millennial Left - American Affairs Journal
“In If We Burn, Vincent Bevins, a former correspondent in Brazil and then in Southeast Asia for leading U.S. newspapers, weaves a narrative from January 2010 to January 2020 that ties together mass protest in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Turkey, Brazil, Ukraine, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Chile. Through interviews with those who were there, on the streets of São Paulo or in Tahrir Square or Maidan, Bevins tells the story of the decade that “surpassed any other in the history of human civilization in its number of mass street demonstrations.”1 <https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/02/omelets-with-eggshells-on-the-failure-of-the-millennial-left/#notes> Bevins’s method is “judging the movements by their own goals.” So we learn that seven of these cases experienced a fate worse than failure. More than just a scorecard, the author also, in initial and final chapters, traces the ways that intellectual history shaped protest, through the tension between verticalism and horizontalism, hierarchy versus spontaneous self-organization, and on questions of representation, meaning, and technological mediation. Appropriate to what the mainstream media treated as social media-driven protest, Bevins satirizes the imagined life course of 2010s-style protests in the style of a tweet2 <https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/02/omelets-with-eggshells-on-the-failure-of-the-millennial-left/#notes> : (1) Protests and crackdowns lead to favorable media (social and traditional) coverage (2) Media coverage leads more people to protest (3) Repeat, until almost everyone is protesting (4) ??? (5) A better society This naïveté runs right through protests in places as different as Chile and Turkey and Hong Kong—perhaps a product of a post-historical generation who really did think that if you got enough people and shouted loud enough, good things would happen. Or as the popular Egyptian blogger “Sandmonkey” explained, via a *Lord of the Rings* reference, he and those he fought alongside in Tahrir Square believed that when Sauron was defeated, all evil would simply disappear from the land. Get rid of Mubarak—good things ensue. In the most tragic of circumstances (Libya, Syria, Ukraine), a protest became a kind of revolution, which became a civil war, which became a bloody international quagmire: “we were very far from the digital world that Western leaders had envisaged. Bad things were happening all around, and raising awareness was very far from sufficient to stop them,” Bevins poignantly puts it.3 <https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/02/omelets-with-eggshells-on-the-failure-of-the-millennial-left/#notes> ..” https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/02/omelets-with-eggshells-on-the-failure-of-the-millennial-left/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#29069): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/29069 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/104522547/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
